An algorithm for designing minimal microbial communities with desired metabolic capacities.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Recent efforts to manipulate various microbial communities, such as fecal microbiota transplant and bioreactor systems' optimization, suggest a promising route for microbial community engineering with numerous medical, environmental and industrial applications. However, such applications are currently restricted in scale and often rely on mimicking or enhancing natural communities, calling for the development of tools for designing synthetic communities with specific, tailored, desired metabolic capacities.

Results

Here, we present a first step toward this goal, introducing a novel algorithm for identifying minimal sets of microbial species that collectively provide the enzymatic capacity required to synthesize a set of desired target product metabolites from a pr

SUBMITTER: Eng A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4920118 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature